@robertandrew - I know how you feel, as do many others.
Actually I got no notice here until I made one post that got some attention, and paid out < $3.
I entered some contests and won one of them. Then one of my posts got Curied, and that paid out nicely.
With that SBD, I used bots on my last post - not particularily proud of that, but I wanted to understand bots on Steemit.
I have upvoted and commented on the posts of others, often with no response. Ouch!
As far as community building here, I have to admit it confuses me. I'm on more than a few discord channels, and for the life of me I'm still not sure how to engage people. Random hellos? It doesn't help that I have had to sign up with half a dozen Steemit-related apps just to do things here.
Decentralization may be the way to go, but sometimes I feel like Steemit has taken this a bit too far. It can be confusing and energy draining.
One of the issues on Steemit, as I see it, is that it can be very difficult to find well written posts. Just a constant streem of posts. Shakespeare would sink soon on Steemit.
Like you, there have been days where I spent hours writing a post, commenting on others, upvoting etc. Then you wake up in the morning and see nothing. Frustrating sure. (mind you, many of my earlier posts were shit.
Investing in Steemit with fiat seems to help, and using bots. But then using bots just makes it harder for others to grow organically.
I think Steemit needs better filtering of content into sub-categories, and a much better serch function.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I upvoted and followed you. Good luck!